


The Dream of Her Leaving

by MistyBeethoven



Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [42]
Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Agnostic Character, Antichrist, Avoidant Personality Disorder, BBW, Broken, Choices, Christian Character, Depression, Difficult Decisions, Dreams vs. Reality, F/M, Falling In Love, Fate, Fate & Destiny, Hackers, Lost Love, Love, Love Stories, Love Triangles, Messiah | Messiahs, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Overweight, Questioning, Questions, Reality, Regret, Sacrifice, Science Fiction, Self-Indulgent, Self-Insert, Self-Sacrifice, Umbrellas, Weight Issues, prayers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23776906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistyBeethoven/pseuds/MistyBeethoven
Summary: Set in between The Matrix and The Matrix Reloaded...The man named Neo remembers the love he found and lost before Trinity entered his life and he became the "One." But when he learns from the Oracle the real reason for his first love's departure will he decide to remain a savior for mankind or will he forsake the cross he has been chosen to bear for a lifetime of human happiness?A retelling of "Keep On Dreaming" from Thomas "Neo" Anderson's point of view and a sequel as such as well.
Relationships: Thomas Anderson | Neo & The Oracle, Thomas Anderson | Neo/Me, Thomas Anderson | Neo/Trinity
Series: "Yes, I Really Am This Pathetic!" or "How to Say I Love You With a Story" [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589944
Comments: 20
Kudos: 22





	1. The Dream of Her Coming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [La_Gata_Nata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Gata_Nata/gifts).



> For La_Gata_Nata whom was kind enough to like "Keep On Dreaming" and wanted a follow up from Neo's viewpoint; one where he also finds out what happened to his lost love. Thank you so much for your kind words. That particular story means so much to me and the fact that you enjoyed it does too.
> 
> This will be a multi chapter fic. Maybe I could have made it be a one chapter deal but my mental and physical health hasn't been great recently. That's also the reason why I haven't been posting everyday like I usually do. It's been hard and painful to deal with; I'm certainly not the strongest person in the world, I'm weak and silly and very, very human. I have trouble writing when I'm upset. My brain feels bad and I have trouble seeing, or concentrating, on the images in my mind to write them down. But writing has helped me this past year and doing these stories with Keanu Reeves' characters especially. *Keanu Reeves* has helped me. It's probably why the first story in this series struck a deep chord with me. My OCD and problems were discussed briefly and the fact that loving and caring for someone brought me some peace at last. What was said to the sleeping Tom in "Keep on Dreaming" was what I feel in a way. I feel better watching and enjoying Keanu Reeves films even the ones that aren't all that great. Demons have ways of returning. They always will. But still if you can love someone in the face of them it means that there is still hope. Neo brought me some peace here in this story's universe; Mr. Reeves, you, bring me some peace in this one. I thank you for that.
> 
> The fact that you'll never know it doesn't make it any less real.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas "Neo" Anderson recollects his first love.

A dream.

When Neo looked back at his life as a person named Thomas Anderson that was all that he considered it to be.

A long annoying, confusing, lie of a dream.

Deep within the Matrix, taking it as a given reality during that stage of his existence, it was difficult for him to view it as anything else. He had awoken the moment he had accepted the red pill instead of the blue one which Morpheus had offered to him. Now the past seemed covered in fog and he no longer craved it since he saw the illusion it had always been.

A god named Neo, now he controlled his life and took responsibility for the salvation and protection of those still left in the Matrix's hold. By his side stood a woman named Trinity and they melded together as one in a perfect union of body and soul. During their lovemaking, Neo often found himself forgetting that they were not one entity altogether, the lines of where their bodies connected being so inconsequential and difficult to discern. They were each perfect in their ways: their minds intelligent, focused, detached yet capable of passion; their beautiful bodies fit and strong, agile and resilient. Two perfect specimens of humanity set to destroy the machines mankind itself had created.

It was only after he had awoken from his sleep, after their heated couplings, that Neo suffered confusion. In those first few seconds, when he'd awake onboard the Nebuchadnezzar or on Zion or wherever else they happened to find themselves, he'd forget exactly where and whom he was, believing himself to be Thomas Anderson once more.

" _Erin_ ," he'd go to whisper assuming it was her sleeping and warm body beside him only to look down and find the athletic form of Trinity holding on to him and realize his mistake instantly.

Of course, even if he had been back inside of the Matrix, the woman he had whispered the name of would not have been sleeping by his side. She had left him weeks before his awakening and never even bothered to give him an answer for her departure or a simple goodbye: the two very things he had needed the most.

Erin had left after he had finally found the strength to tell her that he loved her; it make the wound of her abandonment sting all the worse.

_"I love you, Tom...Neo...Never doubt that okay."_

Her last words to him still had not been able to calm him or offer any solace. It had been hard _not_ to doubt it when waking up the next day to an empty bed, one she had never returned to.

The anger...the bitterness...the pain...the remembrance of these feelings helped return him fully to the true reality lest he find himself falling back into the dream the Matrix presented. As surely the temptation would have been had one Thomas Anderson been sleeping next to a woman possessing the human name of Erin and not the more divinely abstract one of Trinity.

Her leaving had essentially helped him to leave Thomas Anderson behind and truly adopt the role of Neo.

Still whenever he found himself returning to the Matrix, it wasn't Mouse's Woman in the Red Dress which Neo found himself looking for but another one entirely and he cursed himself for it and kept this remnant of his former life a secret to himself. It was the overweight girl he'd met in a small cafe one day when it had started to rain, an event both of them had predicted without the aid of a weatherman, that his eyes would search the crowd for and suffer disappointment when he never succeeded in finding her.

She was the girl he could never tell Trinity about because a part deep within himself, a part which was _supposed_ to be dead inside of the One named Neo, still loved that girl very deeply.

Nor could he understand why, when he had the perfect woman by his side, he still longed for the imperfect one just as equally as well. 

* * *

He'd been lost in his usual thought "What is the Matrix?" the moment the woman carrying the umbrella, had walked through the door of the cafe. The question had then been pushed to the back of his mind, a rare occurrence since it had consumed him for months now, when Thomas Anderson had taken instantaneous notice of her. The very few friends he had probably would have made rude jokes at the woman's expense about it being hard not to with her size but that wasn't the reason why she garnered Thomas' interest. Not the main one anyway. It was that she remained dry while everyone else was soaking wet around them. In her hands, the overweight woman had held her folded umbrella as if it was a crucifix of unique construct. Thomas had been able to tell from the blue of sea and brown, green of earth that when it was completely open it presented a view of the world to those whom happened to pass its owner while she was safely shielded underneath it.

It was the umbrella which had caught his attention first in a way.

His own sat dripping by the legs of the chair he had parked himself inconspicuously in in order to drink a pitch black coffee. He'd argued with himself for a solid fifteen minutes before venturing out that morning if he should even bring it. The sky had been the bright shade of blue depicted on the stranger's umbrella and nowhere in print, screen, air or internet had it called for even the chance of rain. Still some hunch deep within him had made him take the stupid thing with a begrudging growl for it _felt_ right to. He was not a man of faith. He liked what he could see and the fact that he'd caved in to a gut feeling despite all logic and earthly senses disturbed him tremendously.

However, when it had started to rain, he had been grateful for his bit of superstitious whimsy. While others had become soaked fairly fast, he alone had managed to waltz into the cafe as dry as a British sense of humor in order to drink his hot coffee solitarily just as he liked to do.

This woman had the same notion it seemed making him not so unique as he had first thought. On a perfectly wonderfully seeming day she had come prepared even if everybody else on the streets had initially looked at her like she was crazy. She was as dry as he was, though, and as Tom watched her walk to the counter to order what she craved, he found his attention lingering on her for more than just the fact that she had come in carrying an umbrella.

She was a large girl but she didn't move like her weight made any difference or hindrance to her. She moved just as graceful as any of the thinner women he knew and had occassionally dated which was compelling to watch in a way. Her hair was auburn and lay against her back in long waves of curls. Despite her grace she seemed terribly shy, barely even able to look at the barista whom was taking her order. Tom was unaware of the fact that he was staring until she apparently sensed it and turned around to look at him. Finally seeing her face clearly for a few decent seconds, he knew that she was beautiful to him. Her striking wide green, gray eyes looked at him with fear. He felt it too when she returned his gaze though he wasn't exactly a coward by nature. There was something about the stranger which disturbed him; staring into her frightened eyes made him feel as if he could become lost in the soul he saw clearly visible in them. For he wanted to calm the fear she felt and protect her from it. Human contact was something Thomas Anderson, a hacker known as Neo, loathed. He preferred to live out his existence behind both a computer screen and an anonymous handle. But he felt urged to momentarily forsake his self imposed techno isolation then by a simple meeting of eyes in a small cafe which sold a pretty poor tasting coffee if he was being completely honest.

Though the stranger's eyes held fear, he noted that there was a curiosity there also and this gave Thomas Anderson a jolt of excitement and hope as she fled to a vacant booth in the corner of the room. He allowed her a few sips of her Irish cream infused coffee before he destroyed her own solitary state.

"I like your umbrella," he commented as he slid down in the seat across from her.

"Thank you," she replied hesitantly.

"Notice anything about the other customers here?" he asked her sounding somewhat smug even to himself.

She rotated her head to study the other patrons as quickly as she could without drawing their attention. She was painfully shy and feared the chance they would feel her gaze as surely as she had felt his, Anderson knew. Finding her answer at last, she turned to look at him once more and Thomas "Neo" Anderson felt his heart leap from her sweet, shy little gaze and her offering of the correct answer.

"We're the only two people who have umbrellas. And the only two people that are relatively dry, not counting the workers."

Her eyes were truly amazing, he thought. They were worlds unto themselves with water torn between green, gray and blue and earths of pitch black at the center of their globes.

He grinned at her, feeling cocky and enchanted. "Why'd you bring yours? It wasn't calling for rain."

She shrugged. "Something just told me to."

"Same here," he confessed.

The only sound around seemed to be the sound of drops of water falling from each of their umbrellas and onto the seat or floor respectively beside and under them before she finally disrupted this too by asking, "Who are you?"

He loved the way she blushed while she asked it, her pale, soft skin succumbing to a swift burst of color, felt suddenly made crazy by the way it was obvious that she felt uncomfortable by his intrusion yet wanted him to stay.

This was what love at first sight felt like, Thomas Anderson realized, despite years of taking love as just another act that was unworthy of placing one's faith in because it simply could not be seen. Foolish thing really, he thought to himself as well. Who needed to see something when you felt it so strongly that even if you were to suddenly go blind it wouldn't matter in the least? If he were to close his eyes, he would still see this woman. His heart would still feel as if it beat a little stronger while she was near.

And he did not even know her name.

"The one," he replied and felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up straight as if someone had walked over his grave, one more silly superstition for a day seemingly filled with them.

Ignoring the other worldly sensation to focus on the flesh and blood woman sitting before him instead, Thomas quickly placed some change on the table, enough to cover an Irish cream coffee. "Who is going to pay for your coffee," he quickly added.

The question of the Matrix had been forgotten about entirely in the wake of her pretty smile and the shy, hesitant conversation which soon followed; one where he learned, at last, that the name of the woman he had fallen in love with was Erin.


	2. Hearts, Souls and Sunglasses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas Anderson finds himself dividing his obsession regarding the Matrix with the woman he met at the cafe one rainy day.

Thomas Anderson had always possessed an obsessive mind. Once any idea had won his interest he found it difficult to let it go but instead found himself a fish willingly choosing to impale himself on the right hook which presented itself and caught his attention. The Matrix had done that to him in the beginning. It had first appeared to him just as a word but the more he had seen it mentioned in conversation, whispers or chat rooms in seemingly random places the more he had gone searching for it. Life was like that many times. Often you'd hear something and then shortly afterwards something would seemingly pop up in regards to it. You went and downloaded a Top Gun torrent off of the net only to hear a car pass by the next day blaring "Take My Breath Away" as if they were _intentionally_ trying to get you to notice the oddness of it all.

Later on when he had gotten to know Erin better she would tell him such occurrences she always referred to as "God's Thumbprints." As if some Being that had created everything, and was in charge of it all, was trying to to get your attention and let you know that He was there. A simple wave to say hello she claimed.

Thomas would laugh and tell her that he had a word for it too: coincidence.

Still with this initial obsession predating his meeting with Erin, before they both had stumbled into the cafe on a day not calling for rain bearing their umbrellas, it was difficult to label the constant reappearing of the vague and enticingly enigmatic term "Matrix" as just a coincidence. The way it had awakened something in his soul had possessed all the power one felt from the vibrations of any engine starting. And that was what the idea of the Matrix had succeeded in doing with a life which often felt lazy and spent primarily behind a computer screen: jumpstarted his soul. Anderson had felt like he had been sleeping before but he was finally starting to break out of that dream after finding the proper white rabbit to chase after.

Then he had met Erin and he felt a similar awakening and stirring.

Only this one was in his heart and not his soul.

Before when he had heard songs referencing both those parts of a human, he had been confused about what the difference between a heart and soul exactly was. The physical heart beating inside of his body was real enough but the figurative one that could fall in love and be devoted to someone seemed as much a potential falsehood as the soul which they said existed after death and was where the illusion of morals was rumored to reside. Hearts and souls seemed interchangeable and fantastical creations like demons and angels, dragons and unicorns to Thomas Anderson.

Only when he learned of the Matrix and had met Erin did he seem to understand the difference between the two. The soul was your personality in a way, what interested you and your choices and beliefs. It was what you were allowed to keep in a way. The heart was reserved for your love and emotions. It was what you were willingly meant to give to someone else.

If the concept of the Matrix had caught the soul of Thomas Anderson, Erin held his heart.

After meeting her, Thomas Anderson found himself returning to the cafe in the hope of seeing her again. She filled ever second thought he had for the rest of the day following their unexpected introduction, alternating perfectly with his search for the Matrix. Type in "Matrix" in the Google search bar, think of Erin's eyes while he waited for the bar to move and the requested site to download. Scroll down and try to find the desired information about the six letter word. At the bottom of the webpage think of the woman with the World Umbrella's own nice bottom as she had walked away from him. It was a perfect juggling act really between his obsessions on the two subjects he barely knew anything about. But while the Matrix was proving one hell of an elusive rabbit, Erin hopefully would be less so. 

When she had left the coffee shop and headed back into the raining city outside after only a few lean glimpses into the world of her, Thomas found himself desiring a more lengthy bit of travel and was determined to have it. His eyes remained on her through the cafe's large window as she was protected by her umbrella of the Earth they both had shared but had been woefully unaware of before.

She was wearing a smile as she had said goodbye but it was fake as opposed to the few times he had made her genuinely smile. Her sorrow was in her large eyes and her lips when the smile would fade. He wished to know the reason for her sadness and how he could help her with it.

He thought about her umbrella and became unreasonably jealous of it knowing it was protecting her when he could not.

Curiosity was the starting point to any journey, desire was the key to open the door and obsession was what gave you the strength to forget about things which otherwise might have terrified you into staying in your safe little bed and life.

That first time waiting for a second meeting had been the worst for him. Sitting in the booth she had chosen when she arrived the previous day, he watched the hands on his watch moving and feared that with every step they made on their circular running track it meant that the woman would not show.

"Damn Tom, you're being an idiot," he cursed himself under his breath and he virtually wanted to rip the watch off of his wrist and throw it away.

She was too shy. Despite her interest in him, obvious from the look in her eyes whenever they met his and from the rise of color to her ivory cheeks whenever they did, she wouldn't dare return to the cafe. He should have gotten her name or address he knew. Then he could have searched the internet for her and tried to find her wherever else she might have went. That such an act could be considered stalking hardly occurred to him and wouldn't have bothered him too much even if it had. His whole existence wasn't exactly ethical or respectable at this point in his life. After graduating Owen Patterson High he had tried to get some legitimate employment at various software companies in Capital City but had failed miserably when they had been searching more for connections than for any actual natural skill. He'd taken a few jobs here and there all over the city until he had happened to accidentally discover that he could still make a living, if not one he could ever admit publically to, by hacking into computer systems for others whom were willing to pay quite well for his efforts. This branched off slowly to creating systems himself for others, showing them how to become hackers themselves (but ones not quite so good so he could keep his services desirable and unthreatened) and also handing out viruses to those that needed them.

He never bothered to ask why they might. There wasn't as much internal finger pointing and shame that way. Thomas was happy to let the guilt rest with the person whom handed him the payment.

Just to be safe, though, he _had_ created an alias to help protect him from and avoid discovery: Neo.

He liked it because it meant new. New...Just like the feeling of painful anticipation jumbled up with dread he was suffering waiting for the woman he had met yesterday to walk through the coffee shop's entrance. He had about given up, placed his elbows on the table and was ruffling his hair as he set loose a sigh of frustration, when, after a few seconds, he opened his eyes and saw a figure out of the corner of his eyes. Thomas looked up to find Erin standing there, her feelings of discomfort and attraction once more evident in her eyes which seemed wonderfully green in that particular moment.

"Are you waiting for someone?" she asked shyly.

"I was until she came in," he said, smiling up at her. The smile felt too bright, too obviously _interested_. He was a techno geek and a hacker. He was supposed to be cool and hide his emotions. He even hated using emojis for fuck's sake! So why was he finding it so damningly difficult _not_ to smile? "I must have missed the sound of you coming in."

She smiled now as well, equally involuntarily it seemed. "You were groaning too loudly," she commented.

"You heard that?" he asked, feeling any further hope he had held of being cool quickly dash out the door.

She nodded. "You were loud enough to wake the dead."

Erin looked around the coffee shop her eyes landing timidly and lingering on the tables with the few other people surrounding them. He was suddenly afraid of her bolting or making up some excuse to leave. When she turned back to him Tom understood her self doubt was what fueled the one that she decided on.

"I guess, I'll leave you to waiting for the girl that you're really waiting for," she stated.

"But it's you," he replied. "I was waiting for _you_."

She looked as if she doubted the confirmation. "Why?"

"Because I don't like drinking alone," the man answered but knew it was bullshit. He'd been drinking alone ever since he had ventured far away from the happy if somewhat boring household formed by John and Michelle Anderson. Infact, he liked to do everything alone primarily these days except for sex and those encounters usually could not even count as one night stands, their duration being only a half hour or so. 

However, looking at Erin he realized that he suddenly did not want to drink alone anymore so the lie might as well sub for the truth in the moment.

Or, even more truthfully, he didn't want to drink his coffee without her sitting across from him.

She shifted on her feet and looked down at the ground and he suffered the brief vision of watching the back of her leave out the door, this time being all too aware of the bell above it ringing out her exit, when she slid down in the booth. He noted for the first time that she was empty handed, no Irish Cream infused morning beverage in her possession.

"I'll go get your drink," he announced and rose to leave for the counter but she grabbed his arm as he passed her.

"You _don't_ have to do that."

"But you didn't get one," he argued. "They'll throw you out if you don't."

She looked up at him fearfully skeptical. "They'd really do that?"

He frowned and came clean. "I don't know. I hardly ever come here."

She smiled. "Neither do I."

"Why'd you come back then?" he asked, knowing the answer but wanting to see her blush and squirm again.

Which she did but not without throwing the question back at him, "Why did you?"

He wanted to tell her that it was because of her but that was giving too much of himself away, like if he had used his real name Thomas Anderson instead of the false handle Neo when he performed his work as a hacker. If he did that he risked losing the only thing he really possessed these days: his freedom.

She was a nice girl. Cute. Sweet. But white picket fences were too much like suburban prison bars to him, always had been. 

"I like the coffee," he lied again, for he was convinced on this second visit that it was possibly the _worst_ coffee in the city.

She smiled up at him, laughed and tilted her head knowingly, giving away the fact that she thought the coffee tasted like the shit he was full of.

She let go of his arm and Thomas walked towards the counter wishing he possessed a cool pair of sunglasses to properly hide both his eyes and heart behind so when he returned she would not know how much her smile moved him everytime he earned one from her.


	3. Two Losses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neo contemplates the two existences of sex.

Conversations aboard the Nebuchadnezzar could often go to the strangest places very much like the Nebuchadnezzar itself. Morpheus, Trinity and himself did not always feel compelled to disturb the silence that settled around the craft with words whose sole purpose was to make them feel not so alone in a reality which was not the one presented by the Matrix. Still sometimes they were led by this odd mood or that to border on nostalgia and the people they had been when they had been enslaved.

Usually it was Neo who found himself trying to catch some glimpse into Morpheus and Trinity's life during either their time in the Matrix or when they had become free. Neither seemed too interested in his own and with a sense of vague unease that he always needed to squelch, Neo knew that the two former strangers knew far more about his life than he did about theirs.

Today the line of discussion had been broached about when they had each lost their respective virginity. Some joke had been made regarding breaking a cherry as they had needed to enter a particularly tight underwater tunnel. Neo had inquired about Morpheus' loss and the man had replied that it was none of his business.

Besides it did not matter.

"Everything had been a dream before this," Morpheus had said through his gapped teeth. "It wasn't real. We were hooked up to the Matrix: your body never even touched the first person you had sex with."

Neo considered this and respected its validity. It meant, after all, that he no longer needed to worry about coming too early with a girl named Carly Terkoff in the back of his father's Caddy. Still it felt real and embarrassing enough.

"What was truly real happened _here_ ," Trinity said.

Her words came out sounding a little too uncomfortable as if she didn't like the topic of conversation. Neo turned quickly to look at her and wondered if her first time within the Matrix had also been something she would rather just forget. Then he saw clearly how she was staring at him with a tinge of possession in her piercing eyes of blue and he knew that she was jealous. Her love for him made the thought of his being with someone else unpleasant for the woman.

He extended his hand to take hers and the look in her eyes softened.

"Great. There are two times then. We few fortunate ones lose it twice," he stated. "In a dream and in reality. I wasn't in love with the dream. I _am_ in love with my reality."

She walked towards him then in gratitude and kissed his clothed chest as they embraced each other. Neo held her tightly but still found himself wishing that they had never entered the tunnel and made the unnecessarily crude joke. It had once more made him question the existence of a man named Thomas Anderson and what was real and what had been false. Too often these thoughts would come to him and he could usually push them away easily. Except this one disturbed him and he could not escape it as easily as swallowing a pill colored red.

Maybe it was the whole discussion of sex and the two sides it possessed very much like the division of Thomas Anderson and Neo. Or the one between the Matrix and where they now were. There were even various names, handles and aliases for the act of separate bodies becoming one. The two which always came to mind were obvious: 

Sex.

And that other deeper one...

Make love.

You could have sex with anybody; that was not difficult and he had many times before he had met Trinity inside that world which wasn't real. For men that was simple. While a woman could often confuse sex with love, a man would usually relegate it to the simple body function it seemed to be. Romance was bullshit. You did what you needed to in order to satisfy the momentary hunger of your body. Then you moved on to other matters until the urge appeared once again.

A man made love to very few for they did not fall in love so easily.

Why that was Neo did not fully understand. Savior that he was now, the workings of a man's heart was a mystery he still could not fathom, even his own.

What he did know was that he had _not_ loved the first girl he had had sex with.

What he did know was that he _had_ loved the first woman whom had let him make love to her first.

But he could not tell Trinity about this he understood as he held her like she was a cross he desired to nail himself to. Nor could he confess later, after they had made love, that there was a part of himself that now yearned to find where a woman named Erin lay sleeping in her pod so he could wake her up and be her first in reality just as he had been her first inside of a dream. That knowing he had never really had her was destroying him inside whenever he was careless and unmindful enough to let himself think of the subject for too long.

Too many divisions, he thought as sleep claimed him.

Thomas and Neo

Dream and reality.

Sex and making love...

* * *

When Tom slid into the booth across from Erin he could tell that she was suffering from one of her obsessive compulsive moments. He could tell this from the way that she was staring out the window worriedly while her finger traced a symbol on her forehead. It was a heart. This was her talisman when her mind was plagued with the intrusive thoughts which hounded her. She had told him weeks ago when he had first caught her doing it that it helped make her feel better. When her mind became stuck on any thought that troubled her, usually one that was against what she knew of herself or made her doubt that she was a good person, her brain would literally _hurt_ , she claimed. It would start to feel like a car with its tires stuck in the mud, endlessly spinning as the motor, in this case her brain also, became overheated, not going anywhere, especially to more pleasant and less scary of places. Drawing a heart on her forehead helped she said because it represented love, something she had faith in.

Erin hated herself. It was that simple in a way. The hacker had come to realize this about the woman he had succeeded in becoming closer to after much effort. She hated that she couldn't control her ocd and anxiety. She thought that she was a failure because she couldn't make the thoughts she didn't want go away. The woman hated her body and all the things she thought made her less beautiful but her brain was the worst offender of all. The one thing she liked about herself, the only thing she believed was right was her faith in God and Jesus Christ. She had plenty of faith but none actually in herself.

"You okay?" he asked pushing her favorite coffee in her direction. To Thomas Anderson it still tasted like shit but was bearable knowing that the cafe was now what he considered _their_ place.

She met his eyes and the moment she saw him she instantly did seem much better. There was the return of that certain joy this woman brought to him everytime he knew he had helped drive her demons away for a while. He cursed himself that he had been late in meeting with her. He'd thought he'd found another tantalizing clue about the Matrix and had lost all track of time.

Now he hated his distraction for it had meant her suffering and his inability to save her. That feeling was more intoxicating than learning about the Matrix could ever be. It felt not only powerful to be a savior but good too, Tom would think. Especially to her.

"I keep telling myself that it's just conditioning that's all it is but..." she said in defeat. "You know, it was easy for Pavlov to get his dog to salivate everytime he heard that stupid bell but he couldn't condition the poor thing not to after his little experiment was over? Fear does it. Fear helps condition us. And it usually attacks the things we care about the most. Funny though with you..."

She became suddenly shy with that last unfinished confession and avoided looking at him.

"With what?" Tom asked sipping his own awful drink.

"Nevermind," Erin said and he could not persuade her to pick up the conversation again.

Not that he was in a hurry to return to it. Once he had sat down at the booth his friend had lost some of her sorrow. Her smile came freely and he even made her laugh once or twice with an anecdote about his latest client's wish for him to hack into Lucasfilm and distribute a virus from it which would make an image of Yoda mooning spread across their files if they opened an email entitled "Wrong You Were to Open This."

"Want to go take in a film?" he asked her and received a half nod for an answer. "Which one?"

She gave him an answer that did not horrify him and he briefly thought about how most of the films she wanted to see didn't send him running as other girls he had been interested in choices had done. Infact they were pretty much alike in tastes. Other than a few differences which were complimentary, as if they each simply possessed what the other lacked, Erin and he seemed almost made for each other if he believed in such silly things. She seemed to have a foresight into what he needed at any given moment and he would have started suspecting she had researched him online if he didn't cover his tracks so well and if she wasn't so clearly hesitant to outright form a romantic relationship with him.

Which only oddly frustrated him.

They finished their respective drinks and then headed for the theater under a perfect sky of blue. Turning to glance to his side as Erin looked through her wallet, after having argued with him for five minutes that she would take care of her own ticket, Tom saw a man walking by on the other side of the street. He was about five feet two inches, was wearing a green plaid suit which belonged in the seventies and had two patches of frizzy red hair divided by a wide bald road down the middle of his scalp.

This wasn't what caught and held Anderson's attention, however. It was the fact that on a yellow brick wall spotted down an alley, which the man was casually walking by, he thought he saw four words scrawled in red spray paint:

_**WHAT IS THE MATRIX?** _

This stopped the man dead in his tracks, letting Erin walk several steps ahead without realizing it. When Tom finally remembered, he looked and saw the woman standing and looking back towards him about ten feet away.

Everything seemed to slow.

Erin had turned around and was walking back in his direction, a look of confusion on her pretty face...

Thomas "Neo" Anderson was turning back to read the writing on the wall again...

The plaid suited, balding red head was passing by the same wall once more...

Only it _wasn't_ the same wall.

When the stranger passed by the alley, Tom looked and saw only an unmarked wall of blue bricks. The world seemed to visibly spin around him, making him almost fall as he felt a hand rest on his shoulder.

"Tom?" Erin asked in concern.

"I just saw the same man pass by twice," Tom stated. "And down that alley was a wall of yellow with red graffiti. Now it's gone and blue."

Erin stared down the same alley and he looked to her for some kind of reassurance. He noted her looking down the street at the other pedestrians, trying to catch of glimpse of whatever man he'd been referring to, and then studying the alleyway and the wall once again. He feared that she would believe he had gone mad when she simply looked at him with resolve and took his hand. "Let's go check it out."

Tom felt his soul flood with relief for she had not doubted him, her faith emerging strongly once more.

The hacker's flood of relief was broken, however, as the sky went from peaceful blue to stormy gray in one startling second and the first raindrop fell.

"Fuck!" he said as rain started to pour down heavily on them both, this time neither of them fortune enough to be carrying an umbrella. "Here," Tom shouted past the thunder as he urged her to run to his apartment, which was far closer than the theater they had been walking to was.

Later he would ask himself why he had not taken her into one of the nearby shops. The only answer he would ever find was that he had wanted to take her home.

When they reached it, the rain was still pouring down, making the roads almost seem like black rivers. Still they were laughing and out of breath when they walked through the door to his apartment. Tom immediately took off his black t shirt never fond of the way it felt to be clothed and wet. He fired it in the direction of the hamper which was already spilling over with dirty clothes. It was too late to be embarrassed about Erin finally seeing his apartment, the man knew, if only because it was too late to do anything about its current condition anyway.

The young woman just looked around in fond curiousity, however, until she looked out the window and the raindrops pelting the glass like it was angrily trying to get in at them.

"Water's weird," she suddenly stated after a sweet carefree little giggle " _Wet_...I used to sit in the bathtub when I was younger and wonder how you'd describe that to somebody that had never felt it before...used to fascinate and drive me crazy."

Her eyes went to her arm and watched in childlike amusement as a series of raindrops conglomerated on her skin and then slid off. Anderson looked at her face and then to her arm and up to her breasts close to it. He saw how her t shirt was clinging to her. The collar of it was dipping from the weight of the accumulated water which had soaked in and he could see her pale, smooth cleavage.

"Kind of like sex," the man commented, trying to fight how his voice sounded huskier suddenly. "How would you describe how that felt to someone who had never done _it_ before?"

The way she breathed in heavily (an act he saw committed from the heaving of her glimpsed breasts) and quickly looked up at him in shy embarrassment gave her away. He knew then that she had never done it before.

And that he could be her first.

As he stepped towards her, Tom watched Erin take a step backwards as she seemed to realize for the first time that he had removed his shirt.

"Take your shirt off," he tried to urge her to do the same. "And your pants. I'll dry them for you."

Erin looked around in scared shyness. "Incase you haven't noticed I'm overweight," she stated as if in apology.

"I know," he said as he closed the distance between them, leaving only an inch or two.

To prove he did not care, never had, he grabbed her t shirt himself and watched in proud pleasure as she trusted him enough to raise her hands so that he could lift it off. She stood before him shaking as she took care of removing her black jeans by herself while he removed his own ones, having thrown the soaked t shirt towards the hamper where it landed on his own.

"You don't wear underwear," she commented her face turning scarlet as she suddenly took in this fact too.

Thomas "Neo" Anderson shook his head as he finally took her in his still wet arms and kissed her for the first time. It was as sweet a kiss as he could ever have dreamed of. Her timid yet searching hands felt his back, the water there and both his shoulder blades and shoulders. However, when he in return did the same and then started to unhook her bra, she stopped him instantly.

"Don't," she said and although it took his whole strength Thomas Anderson suddenly backed away.

She stood there trembling, her hair wet and in curls on her shoulders, her eyes wide and breathtaking, and he knew that he had never wanted anything so much in his life, not even to discover what the secret behind the Matrix really was. He held back, though, painfully aware of the white mounds of her breasts rising and falling, the pressure of his arousal and the sound of water falling from both of their bodies and on to the floor.

"Don't take the bra off," Erin finally said, her voice as shaky as her body. "You can kiss my breasts and touch them. I _want_ you to...I just don't want you to see them. Not yet."

"What about your panties?" he joked softly. "I'm afraid we can't avoid that?"

"That's fine," she nodded again and then offered him a sweet, trusting smile.

Smiling as well, Tom Anderson acquiesced as he held her and kissed her once more. They made their way to his still unmade bed and fell down on it together as their jeans soaked old raindrops into the apartment floor while it poured down new ones outside.

And the question written on a wall soon vanished inside of the man whom had seen it as quickly as the graffiti had done.

* * *

Tom woke shortly after the rain stopped. The sight of Erin sleeping peacefully on the pillow by him greeted him, his arms around her still. He remembered the sight of her face as he had made love to her for the first time, successfully taking her virginity from her. The memory of her expression making the first journey from pain to physical bliss brought him pleasure also too. That he had made her come made him tremendously happy. That wasn't always a given, he thought, remembering his own first humiliating time with a girl named Carly Terkoff. Erin's virginity had also lessened the odds. But she had reached her peak, he had seen it before he had finally allowed himself the enjoyment of his own climax.

Shortly afterwards, Erin had whispered "I love you," and then in his afterglow and contentment he had fallen asleep before needing to worry about returning the words and thus making himself vulnerable.

But now the woman was sleeping and he could do something that proved it more than three overused words.

Thomas Anderson brought his finger to Erin's forehead and drew a heart there with his fingertip. Once the symmetrical symbol for love had been completed, he kissed her there too.

* * *

In the days which followed, Erin moved in and they began to share their lives outside of the small cafe where they had met. He discovered that she sometimes snored and drooled. She found out that he left the toilet seat up and spent a lot of his time behind a computer screen. But none of these facts were anything more than something they accepted. When one was weak the other was strong for them. When Erin found herself drowning in her unwanted thoughts and depression he was there to extend his hand to pull her back into the air where she could sucessfully breath again. And when he felt his life held no direction or purpose, and the answer to the simple question of what on Earth he was doing could not be found, she was there to remind him that he was only human and a good man that she loved more than all the rest.

* * *

On the Nebuchadnezzar, after their passionate bout of lovemaking, Neo broke out of his sleep to find Trinity sleeping by his side. Trinity did not snore; she did not drool and she had never showed any reluctance in exposing her firm and perfect body to him.

Yet Neo found himself leaning over and tracing a heart on her sleeping forehead and wishing, for just one moment, that there would be a puddle of saliva on the pillow beneath her head. However, before the act was finished she opened her eyes and they stared at one another in embarrassed silence for a second or two.

"What are you doing?" Trinity whispered.

" _I don't know_ ," Neo wanted to reply but it sounded so horribly unsure and _human_ so he decided on just kissing her instead and wiping the question from her mind with another combining of their bodies.

Just as the Matrix had once wiped another question from his own mind by the replacement of a yellow wall with a blue one, an unexpected rainstorm and an act of love with a shy girl whom would not let him see her breasts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think the heart of this story is a god painfully, and with sad yeaning, remembering the time when he was a man. And that this time was represented by his love for a very human woman.


	4. Agnosticism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neo's faith from his previous existence seeps into his current one.

Thomas Anderson had found himself falling into cohabitual bliss with Erin more easily than he had ever suspected he could peacefully co-exist with any other entity other than a computer. Having been a loner for so long, it should have been awkward, at least, in the beginning but it rarely ever had been. Maybe if he had looked closer at the whole situation he would have thought that it was _too_ easy in a way, Neo now thoughtfully considered. Having previously forsaken any idea of something so far off the grid as falling in love, the hacker, more used to haunting anonymous chat rooms for virtual sex or online arranged one night hook ups, should have known something was not right. It was too neat and fell into place so effortlessly that it was destined to fall apart sooner or later. Or for him to have finally awakened. 

It had to be a dream. Neo realized that now. But when somebody entered your life and seemed to understand and accept you so completely, made you feel whole, it was hard to stop, take a few breaths (and also a take few steps away) and see what was _really_ going on.

Erin had only been a dream.

She could never have been anything else, Neo sought to offer himself some comfort with this possibility at as he held onto Trinity's warm and sleeping body and tried to deny his past. This brought to the savior of a similarly sleeping mankind some amount of solace once her memory had been evoked so powerfully following one stupid and crude joke.

Erin had been no more real than Agent Smith and his forever reappearing, multiplied and souless identity. They both had to be nothing more than a cruel creation of the Matrix. They were not real human beings made of true flesh and blood. While a few days before he had been possessed by the desire to find the woman within her pod and wake her up so he could make love to her again for the first time, now he could laugh at the idea. There was nobody to wake up. A woman named Erin, one with a world imprinted umbrella, had never existed to begin with.

There was enough left of Thomas Anderson inside Neo, however, to find doubt forever uneasing the peace that this belief had brought him.

If she had been some false creation, what purpose had she served. And _why_ had she left him?

Always returning to that single question and yet never harboring the hope of an answer, be it inside of the Matrix or now free inside of Nebeccadezzer with his new lover, Neo's calm then inevitably would shatter as he once more adopted Anderson's human doubt instead of his godly confidence.

This too helplessly reminded him of his first love. Foor if there had been one source of contention between them, it had been his disbelieving nature and her all to believing one.

* * *

"Did you just mention me in your prayers?" Tom asked her wrly one night before their inevitable lovemaking.

She had the tendency to say her prayers while she was lying next to him in bed instead of kneeling by its side and earning his teasing. Often she managed to say them to herself, inside of her poor damaged mind, but on the odd occassion she whispered a word now and then and he overheard it. Tonight he heard his own name fall from her lips, ones he urgently wanted locked with his own or exploring his body and not praying to a God whom either did or didn't exist.

"Yes..." she replied hesitantly, bracing herself for an argument or a lecture but not about to lie during a prayer.

They had gone through this before. She always said it was odd that she was the one who had OCD, the doubting disease, but remained a Christian while he had never heard of OCD before their meeting but was a staunch agnostic. She also found it equally odd that her own OCD and anxiety and depression had lessened with his presence: that a doubter had managed to help God bring her some form of peace.

"Erin," he sighed. "I told you to keep me out of them."

"How can I when you're the person that means the most to me?" she responded, grabbing on to his black t-shirt clad chest.

Tom tried to keep the glow her words had caused to shoot throughout the body she was holding from her. She was always making such declarations of love as if it didn't truly cost her anything. He, on the other hand, couldn't bring himself to even use a simple term of endearment like "angel" when addressing her. Even though Anderson felt that if such creatures existed the woman lying next to him would surely have been one.

"Well don't," he reproved. "You know, I don't believe in prayers. If God exists, He sure doesn't act like He hears them or cares one way or another. People keep praying to be saved...for someone to show up and be a savior to their sorry asses but nobody ever comes."

"He already _came_ ," she argued. "You've just got to believe in him."

"All I know for certain, and that's all that's _worth_ anything, is that people keep praying and all they ever get is silence," Thomas Anderson rebuffed. "So either there is Nobody up there or He's not worth praying to anyway because He's just ignoring us."

She was trembling a bit. He could feel her body's unintentonal movement beside his own and instantly regretted his angry words. It was only that her refusal to see logic and reason frustrated him sometimes. Possibly because he loved her despite it and because of it as well. Something his friends in High School, where he'd been an evangelical agnostic, would have laughed at him for.

"Sorry," he apologized.

"But if He ever decides to listen..." she stated, ignoring his apology, "I want Him to hear my voice saying your name and to know how much you mean to me."

Tom swallowed abruptly. The woman always knew what to say to defeat him and his anger or annoyance. Your most deadliest enemy was not the one that aimed a knife at your throat; it was the one whom knew how to melt your heart with just the right assortment of words.

"Well finish your fucking prayer to the ultimate deadbeat Dad and then make love to me, okay?" he admonished.

Erin kissed his chest and said the rest of her nightly supplication inside of her head. Once finished, she was laughing which both infuriated and turned him incredibly on. "What is it now?" he snapped.

"Why Thomas ' _Neo_ ' Anderson...I do believe that your jealous," she accused playfully.

"Ridiculous," he muttered but felt enough irritation to suspect her words held some truth. Erin never so much as looked at another man but she brought God to bed with her every night and there He lay between them. Maybe he _was_ a little jealous of God, Tom knew. He wanted Erin for himself, her love not to be divided.

"If I became a god would you pray to me and I'd have your full attention then?" he whispered.

"Oh," Erin said silkily as she positioned her large body on his torso and then straddled his eagerly responding lower anatomy. "You've got my full attention now, hacker boy."

She leaned over, offering the man a glimpse of her still yet to be fully seen breasts, and kissed him with the lips she had just used to pray to God with. She then proceeded to prove her words completely to him.

* * *

Often waking before Erin did, Thomas often drifted over to his computer and let her continue to sleep. He had never enjoyed his dreams all that much, finding their lack of coherency and logic unsettling. Besides, he had things to do while his lover was sleeping. His career as a hacker had momentarily suffered due to his connection with his new live in lover. At first, his connections had been hesitant to do business with him knowing he no longer lived alone. It had taken some coaxing to convince them that Erin wasn't a spy or plain clothes officer ready to bust all of their asses. Neo didn't believe that officers were allowed to do the things that the woman had been doing with him over the past few days. At least, not to arrest lowly hackers such as himself.

Eventually his customers had come around and his usual form of income had returned.

There was also the fact, however, that spending time with the woman he had come to care for deeply was making a dent in his "professional" life. Trying to find time to get down to business instead of the more pleasureable type was becoming increasingly difficult. These nights, he made it a point to wake before she did and silently go to his computer and earn his "daily bread" as Erin would phrase it. In truth, it also allowed the man a blissful moment beforehand, where he could stare unobserved at his lover's face and trace the shape of a heart on her forehead, as both a talisman to guard over her in the world of dreams and a sign of the love he hadn't found the strength to form into words to offer her.

In some ways, he felt as if he was not worthy of saying them. He was only a hacker after all; his comment about becoming a god had been a joke and humanly impossible.

Juggling his new life with Erin and keeping his professional life and online reputation as Neo alive and well was difficult but was possible, on the other hand. 

In between, he still found time to research the Matrix, even if he came up empty repeatedly. The conundrum with the changing wall and the stranger, whom had passed by it twice, was recalled but no amount of surfing the web brought up any answers. He began to think he had merely been suffering the after effects of the recreational drugs he had taken in his youth.

And just a few days before the incident too.

Pills could be dangerous. You never knew where taking even just _one_ could lead you.

Now, a few days after hearing Erin whisper his name in her monologue to God, he was searching the net again for his favorite six letter word and coming up with a seven letter one in its place:

Nothing.

Hearing the woman in the bed behind him stirring, Neo knew that Erin had awakened at some point and was now staring at him. He could feel her eyes on his back and noticed the change in the sound of her breathing as if it was the sound of his own heartbeat.

Suddenly wanting to introduce her finally to the other obsession in his life, and wondering if she might not have an answer for him too, Neo asked, "You ever hear of the Matrix, Erin?"

"The Matrix?" she repeated, obviously still half asleep. Hearing the subtle sound of the bedsheet moving, Neo knew that she had sat up then and was attempting to shake free from the sleep which still had its hold on her. "Dot Matrix I know from Spaceballs. I used to associate it with my old Gameboy too."

Neo laughed in amusement. By referencing the old Nintendo handheld game system she had briefly reminded him of the difference in their ages. She had also proved her complete unfamiliarity to _his_ particular Matrix. "I don't think that answers the question I'm searching the answer for."

She was climbing out of bed and walking towards him, half curious about the subject but also longing to be closer towards the object of her affection. Neo tried to focus on the monitor in front of him instead so that he wouldn't notice how short her nightshirt was and that she wasn't wearing anything underneath it. Erin held herself and, gazing down at him, asked, "And that would be?"

Neo turned to look at her then, feeling more assured of his self control, and posed to the woman he loved the question which haunted him, "What is the Matrix?"

Watching as she contemplated it with the seriousness of a wiseman sitting cross legged on a Tibetan mountain, Neo enjoyed it even more when she slid down onto his knee and began to stare intently at the screen, trying to help him find an answer in the blurbs offered on the Google search page.

"Have you ever had the feeling that there is something wrong with the world?" Neo "Thomas Anderson" asked his lover.

She turned to look at him in bemusement. "I'm a Christian and a pessimistic one, remember?" she reminded him. "I think _everything's_ practically wrong with the world."

Thomas "Neo" Anderson turned to look at the woman and saw her soulful eyes gazing at him. He remembered her whispered prayer for him and knew that it had probably sat beside one for the whole world: a world which she feared was doomed. Tom suddenly kissed her cheek and held her tighter, feeling then, if he had been a god, he would have willingly let himself be nailed to a cross to answer her prayers or preformed some equal act of self sacrifice.

All he could do in reality, though, was state in reply, "Well, I think it all ties in with the Matrix."

Erin wrapped her plump arms around his shoulders and Neo avoided looking at her again, afraid she might see written in his eyes how much she meant to him and how much she possessed the power to hurt him because of it. He loved her but trusting someone not to break your heart took as much faith sometimes as believing in a God.

Neo moved the mouse around on its pad, darting the cursor around on the monitor. "I just need to find out how and _what_ it really is."

"Be careful," Erin warned cautiously, her body tense on his knee. "The truth can be a bitter pill to swallow."

The screen flashed red at her words, as Neo had clicked on a link with the word "Morpheus" in the blurb and suddenly the hacker's heart felt as if it had stopped. He felt the sensation one experiences upon being jolted awake when the fog has been lifted abruptly and entirely. Feeling for one frightening instant, as text downloaded onto the screen, that the weight had gone from his knee and Erin was no longer there, Tom turned and found her looking at him with similar sorrow and fear visible in her own eyes. He touched the side of her face to ensure that she was there and told himself that it had only been the flash of red which had caused his momentary flash of anxiety and concern that he had lost her somehow.

Red was associated with so many things that caused terror, after all: a red light to mean stop, the flashing one of an alarm, the spilling of blood which resulted in death.

There had been no reason to connect it to a sudden absence of her; it had merely been conditioning

Still, Thomas Anderson found himself clicking the X on the top right of the screen and closing the webpage before even reading a single word it contained.

"That's a very _short_ nightie you got on," Tom stated, changing the subject almost instantly. He let the fingers on his shaking hand begin to slowly crawl up the woman's leg.

Erin moaned and then kissed him almost desperately. Her kiss betrayed the fact that she was strongly afraid that she would lose him one day also. The hacker found no better way of dispproving her fear then intensifying the kiss and then carrying her to the bed and proving his love by an act. Lying her down on the bed, Tom started to lift the nightshirt up so he could kiss her breasts. "No," she protested and wriggled underneath him.

Tom brought his hand to her face once more and lovingly carressed it with his thumb. "Please," he requested and her struggle ended.

She was crying as he lifted the nightshirt up and saw for the first time the sight of her breasts. As he brought his mouth to her left breast first and attempted to show to her that he loved them as much as the heart he felt beating rapidly, through her skin and against his lips, her tears turned to shy sighs and finally more bold cries of pleasure as he entered her.

The only color red concerning them then being the color of their hearts and bodies.

Holding each other tightly as they fell asleep, as if afraid someone was swiftly approaching to tear them apart, Thomas promised himself to avoid ever mentioning the Matrix to Erin again. Doing so had only unnerved him. It felt incredibly _wrong_ to have asked her that particular question, as if the Matrix and she were never supposed to make one another's acquaintance. Instead he would keep it to himself, as nothing more than a hobby in his free time, much like some men kept dirty magazines or downloaded porn far away from their girlfriends eyes. He did not need those items, his lover being singularly enough for him as he was for her.

Their only rivals, it seemed, were to be of questionable existence.

He had the Matrix and she had her God.

* * *

Carrying out the daily missions necessary to help in the eventual destruction of the Matrix, and the desired awakening of the world, Neo found questions of faith often unimportant when you found yourself becoming a god. But habit was difficult to break. Neo found his agnostism shifting to Erin instead. Did she exist? He could never be sure of it. The answer in his mind could shift on any given day, influenced by his mood or simply the weather inside of the false world of the Matrix.

Sometimes he was sure that she was a construct and nothing more; some creation that the machines probably laughed over his love for because she was not real, never had been. Even more of a fantasy, infact, then they were. Her OCD and emotional anguish, the disorder he had brought to her some form of escape from and comfort for, had just been a lie in order to prey on his human compassion and pity.

Then he would think of her tears and how he had tasted them often, how he had made love to her and held her so closely afterwards, remembered how it had felt when his fingertip traced the heart on her sleeping forehead and he could not believe that she did not exist somewhere.

Tormented inside by this doubt, finally given a glimpse into the pain and obsessive thoughts the first woman he had ever loved, one whom may or may not have existed, had faced daily, lying continuously to Trinity and Morpheus when they asked if he was alright, having caught his mind wandering, Neo understood that there was one entity that he could turn to to help him.

The only question being whether the Oracle would be as willing to help him with a personal matter as she had been in helping him with his destiny of becoming the One?


	5. Forever Why

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neo enters the Matrix to ask the Oracle if his first love ever really existed.

"You can't join me this time. It's something that I have to do alone," Neo informed his lover as he sought to slow the pace of his continually racing mind and enter the Matrix.

"Is it the reason why you have been so distracted lately?" Trinity asked bluntly, never one to beat around the bush.

Neo briefly contemplated what it would be like to lie to her without really considering doing it, as, all the while, the Nebeccadezzer made its soft low noises around them. In the bliss and perfection of their relationship deceptions were unnecessary; those were for humans that failed to understand one another, not the holy union of this woman and himself.

"Yes," he replied, hoping that the next question to emerge from her lips would not be, "Why?"

Trinity's blue eyes remained fixed on his but she stayed silent. Neo hoped in a state almost close to desperation that he would not see pain in them or doubt. If he saw either emotion, for even one second, he would lose the perfect window of opportunity that the day had presented: offering the chance to see the Oracle by himself. And to ask her if a woman named Erin had ever really existed. He could not bring Trinity with him on such a personal task, one belonging to his former life inside of the Matrix. It would be akin to inviting your current girlfriend along to meet with the detective you had hired to spy on your ex: foolish _and_ insensitive. Still if the woman he loved now in his role of a god's eyes flashed with the two emotions that he associated with the woman he had loved then his resolve would dissolve and he would be forced to stay.

Instead Trinity looked at him with the resolve and confidence he closely linked with her, as if she were the inverted self of his former lover.

"Go and do what needs to be done," Trinity told him and Neo knew that there would be Hell to pay if he did not follow through with her command.

"Will you do me the honor?" Neo asked, settling back in the chair and preparing to enter the realm of his enemies once more.

Trinity walked over to the control panels.

"We'll have our adventures later," she proclaimed before hurtling her lover into the world of the dreaming.

* * *

"We'll go on adventures later. Now it's important for me to save," Thomas Anderson stated as he gently stroked Erin's hand with his thumb.

They were sitting in their little cafe, the one with the horrendous coffee but also the one that had provided him with the only company he had ever truly wanted. He had just finished telling her about his employment at a software company called Meta Cortex, a decision which surprised her almost as much as it had done with him.

However, although that news had shocked his lover, another event seemed to have taken her off guard even more.

" _We_?" Erin asked, a smile helplessly claiming her lips. "Did you just say ' _We'll_ ,' Thomas Anderson?"

It had just slipped out. A word he had thought of a million different time in regards to Erin and himself but often hesitated on using unless it falsely led the girl to believe that what they had was forever. Tom had little faith in forevers of any kind. Yet that was the word he would often think of as he stared at her waking or dreaming face. He wanted to be with her forever.

Not replying to her question, Thomas kept carressing her hand, too shy to meet her green-gray eyes. They were a "we" now he thought silently to himself. His inviting her to live at the apartment had perhaps been the first step. But he realized it was nowhere close to the monumentous decision he had just made to sit behind a desk for a great portion of his life. Well...not that he didn't already do that when he was in the role of a hacker named Neo. But this was different. This involved a set schedule and a boss continually breathing down his neck to get things done on time and ripping into him if he made so much as one mistake. This involved responsibility and an incredible dent in his freedom. Tom knew that it also involved planning for a future when before he had preferred leaving that to be some unknowable and free creature all its own.

Feeling Erin's soft skin against his thumb, he started to trace a heart there, daring to make it only once, and wondered if she could feel it despite its short existence.

* * *

Inside of the Matrix, Neo passed Mouse's Woman in Red once again. It always struck him as bittersweet that she was left to survive inside of the false world without her real creator. He had the desire to stop her momentarily and ask if she knew of any sweet looking plus sized women named Erin, ones which were also possibly of some imaginary construct. Still he refrained. The Oracle would tell him soon enough. Besides talking to Mouse's girl felt _wrong_ somehow. Akin to if he had found the now dead man talking to his own lost lover, even about something as innocent as what chicken really tasted like. They each had their fantasy girls and it felt right that they didn't trespass into each other's dreams.

Looking down an alley, Neo half expected to see " ** _What is the Matrix_**?" written on a wall but the only thing spray painted there was a four letter word and some crude sketches of male genitalia. There was no reappearing, frizzy red heads for that matter either.

This last thought suddenly caused Neo to realize that an Agent had yet to make an appearance. Not in the mood for a battle, wishing to get to the Oracle as quickly as possible so that he could find out that his suspicion that Erin had been nothing more than a Smith like creation herself was true or not, Neo knew that he should have been grateful to be left alone and untargeted. However, something about the fact that Agents Thompson, Jackson and Johnson were leaving him alone seemed eerie in itself. It was that same feeling one got when they sensed from the silence and the change from hot to cold in the air that a very nasty storm was approaching. He couldn't help but feel as if his visit to see the Oracle this one solitary time had been allowed. As if the Agents _wanted_ him to go there.

As did the Matrix itself.

* * *

Sometimes while he was busy slaving away at his new job at Meta Cortex, Thomas Anderson wondered if he really _should_ be there. It had seemed too easy in a way. All of his other co-workers had the proper degrees, reputations or connections. He possessed none but had still miraculously managed to get the position which had also miraculously become available. Even if his boss did like to light into him almost as if it were a part of his daily schedule. But something felt wrong about the whole deal somehow; like someone had arranged it for him. If they had, Anderson didn't know if he should thank them or kick the shit out of them. He was doing it all for his future with Erin but...working nine to five was a fucking Dolly Parton song not something he had intended for his life.

All throughout those long eight hours he would find himself constantly asking what the Hell he thought he was doing there and why he continued to stay. The workday was hopelessly monotonous, his boss almost enough to convince him that there was such a thing as the devil, and the other people whom surrounded him a reminder of why he had purposely avoided becoming one of them. Everyday he went to work he found his sanity slowly disintegrating as the day wore on until he found himself on the subway heading back home, promising himself never again and that he'd sleep in the next morning and just let his boss take the job and follow the advice of another Country and Western singer by shoving it.

Those would be his thoughts, anyway, right up until he walked through the door of the apartment. Then he would see Erin and she would have the sheer _audacity_ to be there to greet him when he stepped into the apartment they shared. Or to be fixing supper for him, knowing he would be hungry when he got home. She possessed the pure _nerve_ to soothe all of his weary frustration away with only the smile that he caused to flash across her face just because she had seen him. And all he could think of was how he longed to come home to her in the house he felt she deserved and not a cheap little apartment in a poor part of the city.

So he would return home from the job he had sworn to quit only to be reminded of why he had taken it in the first place and swear to himself with even more conviction that he'd return to it the next day and work even harder to get a promotion in order to insure he could afford to paint some picket fence white in a future he had never before believed in or that he could have ever of wanted it.

One evening, after a particularly grueling day, Tom arrived home and found Erin busily setting a meal on the table. He looked into the large bowl sitting at its heart, while he removed his tie, and saw what it was.  
"Spaghetti?"

It had been in his thoughts all day; the meal he had almost thought of calling her up a million times to make but had always stopped himself, not wanting to bother her. If he could believe in telepathy, Tom thought, he would have believed that his mind was linked to hers; that she had been made for him.

Erin raised her eyes from the fork she was setting down and he noticed a look of worry there. Believing it to be her concern that he was disappointed, Anderson rushed to calm her worries by asking her how she had known what he wanted. He was content, staring into her large eyes, seeing her hand resting on the table and the shape of her body, knowing that once the meal was over he would be having her for his real dessert.

"I don't know," she replied. "I just did."

* * *

Maybe if Erin hadn't had OCD and depression issues, Tom often told himself afterwards, when he was left with the vacancy her absence created in his life, he would have been better prepared for her vanishing act one fittingly rainy night; he could have easily have known that something wasn't right

But while in the days leading up to her leaving Thomas Anderson had noticed that the woman had suffered a relapse in the depression and obsessive thoughts which had plagued her before their meeting, the same ones that she had often stated his presence had made lessen, he had made the human mistake of connecting them to the fact that he was away at work for most of the day. Cursing himself for leaving her alone with her worries, Thomas similarly comforted himself with the knowledge that it was all for her that he was doing it. Soon he would let her know that. He just needed to find the right moment and summon all of his courage. When it _felt_ right, like Erin, herself, was always saying she waited for, he would tell her.

She was sitting on the bed, one day, staring off into space; her eyes were filled with the sad fear which usually accompanied any of her battles during a moment where she was struggling with her broken mind. A great surge of love for her coursed through his body and he saw her in that moment as vulnerable and strong all at once. Being his day off, Tom was grateful that he was there to try to help her. Creeping into the bed behind Erin, Tom happily wrapped his arms around her and held her. Her body was soft and warm and he enjoyed the feeling of it almost guiltily: she was the one whom needed comfort; he was merely trying to give it to her but receiving pleasure while he did.

"Unwanted thoughts?" he asked without really needing to.

"Yes," she replied.

"How about we go away someday soon?" he held her closely.

Erin craned her neck backwards to look up into his face. "Where to?"

"Wherever you want."

She listed off her destination and the hacker smiled. He was so in sync with her mind and thoughts that he had known she would choose that specific country. He had believed then that he knew her completely; better, perhaps then he could know any other person alive.

"Tom?"

"Yeah?"

"Did you ever find out what the Matrix is?"

The color red flashed across Anderson's eyes. It still seemed almost a blasphemy his lover saying that word. He hadn't managed to get over his fright and feeling from that one night that Erin was never intended to mix with his former favorite obsession. Yes...former, Thomas Anderson thought with an odd acceptance. He had not realized it before but he had gradually forsaken his search for the Matrix in favor of building a life with Erin. Whatever the Matrix was could wait; possibly forever.

"No," he answered.

"Have you _looked_?"

The brief possibility that her worry and the Matrix were somehow connected posited itself to him but he shoved it aside to answer her question instead.  
"I've been so busy with work, including the viruses and information selling on the side, there hasn't been enough time."

She tilted her head away from him and in that moment, Tom found his own worry, the sense of wrongness he associated with Erin and the Matrix, and the apprehension that by mixing the two he would inevitably lose her, intensify until it was a belief. But she was _real_ and she was _here_ , he comforted himself. In order to prove it, his body began to seek physical reassurances in hers. His hands clutched her breasts, the same ones she had denied him the sight of but which he now had become intimately familiar with. His lips found the bare skin on her neck and started to kiss it hungrily. Everything felt _there_...Everything felt _real_ , most wonderfully real! Thomas Anderson felt his body appreciating and responding to that realness and his ears received even more proof from the moan which escaped her mouth as his hands dipped under her clothing to touch her bare skin instead. They started to make love, a passionate affair, one which seemed to free the girl from her own obsessions even if at the start Thomas "Neo" Anderson believed he could still see a trace of sadness in her eyes. Seeing it, however, only urged him to become his woman's hero all the more and make her forget by the love professed in every touch and meeting of his lips against her skin.

He would willingly die to protect Erin, desiring to be nothing less than her savior, Neo understood.

* * *

Walking towards the Oracle's apartment, Neo felt no longer a storm inside of his being but rather some frozen ice age instead. He did not know what the Oracle would tell him but sensed that his soul was seeking to protect itself. There was no victory in what he sought from the Oracle only defeat. Should Erin have been some illusory creation, Thomas Anderson's heart would break with the knowledge his love had been all for a lie. But to find out that she had been real and abandoned him meant the continued torture from never knowing the reason for her leaving.

To die from a lie...

Or

To die from the why...

Which was worse?

Unless the Oracle could offer to him the answer he had never been able to find, Neo felt as if his torment would be everlasting.

Inside of the apartment, shown in by one of the Priestesses and made to wait and watch a film called "Them" on the small TV, nobody else there but his lonely self, Neo was eventually given the go ahead to go forwards to the kitchen. Entering it, the man found it similarly empty and was filled with an anger he had not experienced for a very long time.

"Damnit," he swore until he knocked over a vase set in the place of the one he had destroyed the last time. When he raised his eyes, he found the Oracle staring at him in her all knowing little way.

"Sorry," Neo apologized.

"History repeats...but you are here for the past anyway," she stated. "So don't worry about it."

"You know why I am here?" he asked.

"Yes," the woman answered before she sat at the small table to the side of the room. "You don't want to know _where_ Erin is; you want to know _if_ she is or ever was."

Neo nodded.

"You'd better sit down then," she warned, casually lighting a cigarette.

"Why?" the man offered her the question he had hoped she would answer. "You think that I won't like what you're about to tell me?"

"No," she replied rather sorrowfully. "Because when gods decide to fall from grace they hit the ground far too hard for my liking."

Neo swallowed harshly and then took the offered seat.


	6. Divine Intervention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thomas "Neo" Anderson discovers what happened to Erin and finds himself making several difficult decisions.

"What is the opposite of sin?"

They had been lying in bed together after their little discussion about travel and following bit of Heaven on a Sunday afternoon. That was what Erin felt like in his arms, after all: his piece of Heaven on Earth. Thomas' thoughts went to a ring he had seen in the window of a store he passed on his way to MetaCortex every weekday morning. It was encrusted with aquamarines in the shape of the numeral 8, the birthstone and number of the day the first woman he had ever truly loved. Taking her hand in his own, Tom began to lazily stroke the ring finger and wonder if the vacation they had briefly planned might not be turned into a honeymoon as well.

Then Erin disturbed his thinking with that single question and Tom could only find the strength to think about it briefly, feeling the drowsiness of afterglow trying to pull him down blissfully in to sleep.

"I never thought of it before," he commented, trying to stay awake.

"I have. It's like describing the word wet; it drives me crazy if I think about it for too long. A sin is wrong. It's against God and it also hurts somebody else, especially the sinner...but I can't find the right word for its opposite. Virtue seems more like a personality trait...good sounds too trite somehow...besides Jesus once said when it was used as spiritual praise it could only ever be used towards God...so what is the _opposite_ of sin?"

Tom pulled himself a little more out of his sleepiness sensing that one of Erin's obsessions had returned again. It was, as if after their passionate bout of lovemaking, the demon in her mind had driven her right back to where she had been before. Once again, Thomas Anderson found himself wishing to play Christ if only to heal her damaged brain and cast out all the demons which haunted her once and for all.

"Why does it matter?" he asked. "You're not bad, Erin."

"Maybe if there was a word for the opposite of sin, I wouldn't feel like that was all I ever did," she whispered softly and he felt her tears against the skin on his neck. "Like I can never do the right thing...the _opposite_ thing...because it doesn't even have a name."

Fully awake then, Thomas repositioned his body so he could look into her wide green-gray, weeping eyes. "Don't cry," he stated, feeling on the verge of not heeding his own words. "We'll find it together," he promised, placing the palms of his hands against her cheeks.

She began to cry more violently then after hearing the vow and Thomas Anderson reached around and pulled her forcefully towards him, where he held her tightly in his arms, feeling her trembling.

" _Together_ ," Erin whispered, half in repetition and half in question.

* * *

A few days after having made his promise, and even though it would make him late for work and earn his boss' ire, Tom walked into the jewelry store instead of simply passing by it. The ring with the joined circles that held no beginning nor end was still waiting for him. He could think of no better way of helping Erin out of thoughts which returned more and more often to the question of sin than helping to stop her from living in it.

"Oh!" the old man behind the counter said when the hacker asked to buy the piece of jewelry. "The infinity ring! Or the lemniscate! Depending on how mystical or mathematical you are."

Tom laughed. He had only ever thought of it as the figure 8 inside of his head. Still he answered, "The latter for me then. But Erin would probably go with infinity."

"Is she your girlfriend or wife?"

"Fiance," Tom stated. "Or I hope so after I give her the ring."

"So you're going with aquamarines and not diamonds?" the pawnshop man commented, stopping his slow march towards the window in the hope of making a bigger sale and Tom tried not to look at his watch or think about another lecture from Mr. Rhineheart about punctuality.

"Yeah," Tom said, rubbing the back of his head in anxiety fueled impatience. "She's not a surface level kind of girl. Trust me; this will mean more."

The elderly man nodded and resumed his trek back towards the infinity ring, knowing he could not persuade his first customer of the day to spend even more.

"Actually its strange that you even have _that_ ," Thomas remarked with a giddy smile inspite of his irritation at the old man's pace. "It's almost like something put it there for me to see. If I believed in that sort of thing."

"The Matrix," the shop owner stated flatly, his back now facing Anderson.

"What?" Neo asked and felt his throat seize up as his heart lost its next beat.

"The matrix," the older man repeated more jovially. "That's what they call the soil where fossils and crystals are formed."

"There's another thing I didn't know," Thomas "Neo" Anderson commented, trying to also return to his former impatient but not unnerved state and ignore his unease.

"The first step to personal growth and divinity is admitting that you don't fucking know everything," the Pawnshop man stated with a wink and an enlightened grin.

* * *

Tom earned the wrath of Rhinehart triple times over for his tardiness, just as he had feared, and there was going to be a huge dent on the Visa bill at the end of the month, but whenever Tom felt exhausted or ready to punch his boss in his overused jaw, his fingers would roam to the ring inside of his pocket and he'd find the kind of peace that Erin was always telling him that he brought to her. The software programmer kept his eyes on the clock for most of the shift waiting for the end of his workday so he could return home and ask his live in lover to become his legal wife.

Climbing the stairs, Thomas felt the weight of the day fully on his shoulders and back once more. He suddenly envisioned himself as a prince scaling a tower to reach his princess at the top even though fairy tales had done little to please him in his youth. "What man would be stupid enough to risk his life to try to rescue some silly girl?" he had often asked a parent or teacher, never believing once in their reply that it was out of love for romantic love was something he didn't believe in.

The moment he walked through the door and Erin looked at him, however, the aches in his body all left him and Tom felt his smile returning easily as she rushed towards him, falling into his arms. Although he could smell the supper she had prepared, it was forgotten about while they kissed each other with an ardour which confessed that food was not what they were hungry for anyway.

Placing Erin gently down on the bed, she gazed up at him with a love so complete it seemed to be overwhelming her. "I love you, Tom...Neo...Never doubt that okay?"

Looking down at her sweet face, her eyes pleading with him to believe her, Thomas ran his fingers through her soft brown-auburn hair and at last accepted the reason why a Prince would scale a hundred towers for his princess _would_ be love in the end just like they had always said. Apparently it needed to be felt to be learnt, he now understood.

"I love you too, Erin," he finally found the courage to say and risk the breaking of his heart.

She was crying as they began to kiss once more. Removing his jacket carefully so the ring would not fall out from the pocket, Thomas Anderson decided that he would save his proposal until after he had rescued his princess from the demons which sought to destroy her from the inside of her mind.

Only, after their lovemaking was over, Thomas Anderson found himself unable to fight off the weariness of the day. He fell asleep in his lover's arms, the last sensation he felt being her soft lips on his face.

It was the last time he would see Erin.

The last time, at least, before he went to ask the Oracle if she had ever even existed.

* * *

The Oracle did everything in her own time Neo thought with both irritation and patience. Maybe since she possessed almost complete knowledge she saw fit to let each second pass her by without running after it in human desperation. The Thomas part of him wished to hurry her along as quickly as he could though.

"I'm sitting now," he reminded her as she took another drag on her cigarette.

"Is it comfortable?" she asked calmly.

"Yes," Neo replied.

"Good," she remarked. "Because I've been talking with the girls about getting new ones. But I'm waiting for a sale..."

Neo waited impassively.

"...six months and two weeks from now," she finished, shaking the ash from the end of her cigarette into the tray to her side.

"Please," Neo asked. "Let me know...was Erin real?"

"That's what you ask me _now_ , Neo," she replied. "And then you will ask me why she left you."

Neo's brain processed this, attempting to wean an answer from it by himself. Agent Smith had existed inside of the false world he had re-entered; Erin being somewhere inside of it didn't serve to prove her flesh and blood existence. He had to turn his mind on some other aspect she had said. "But I won't ask you where she is outside of the Matrix? So she doesn't really exist."

The man felt both proud of himself and horribly wounded. He had figured out her small riddle but the answer was just as painful as he had feared. There was no more comfort in loving some imaginary creation than there was in loving a woman whom had abandoned him without reason.

"No," the Oracle stated. "She's outside of the Matrix. It's just you aren't about to ask me _where_ after you ask me _why_ she left you. You won't want to leave the Matrix after that."

Anger rebuilding inside of his soul, Neo glared at the prophet and asked the question he had already asked far too many times: "Why did she leave me?"

* * *

When Thomas Anderson opened his eyes, his first instinct upon hearing the rain outside was to reach for Erin and hold her in the hope of making love with her again. The rain always inspired in him a desire for her after their first time having been fueled by an unexpected downpour. It was instinct almost, so, even in his wakening daze, he felt the side of the bed for her sleeping form to know it hopefully once more. Only the side of the bed beside him was empty and cold.

"Erin?" Tom called out, hoping she had gone to use the washroom and would be back soon.

Impatient after hearing no response back, the man climbed out of the bed and rapped on the bathroom door. "Erin?"

No reply again.

Thomas went to the table and found the evening meal now cold but still untouched. He placed his hands on the edge of the table and clutched the old worn wood as he stood in the kitchen, trying to make sense of her absence. She was always there. This was striking not only in its essense but also in how _unusual_ it was. Feeling his fear building, Thomas went through the apartment, finding all of Erin's belongings still there (except for the clothes she had been wearing before) while their owner remained regretfully absent. Rushing at last to his jacket, the hacker quickly fell to his hands and knees and searched the pocket for the ring. Finding it, he gazed at the sparkling blue sign for infinity but found no answers in it.

Throughout the next days, as long as the ring was kept sitting safely in the palm of his hand, Thomas Anderson believed that somehow the woman he loved was coming back to him. In the meantime, he searched the internet for some trace of her but found startingly less information than he had even on the Matrix. Going to the police proved just as fruitless, their systems were already flooded with the names of the city's vanished. An overweight girl with no important connections and mental and emotional problems was not at the top of their list of people to actively search for.

Thomas' worst fear had seemingly come true: he had finally confessed his love to her only to have his heart be shattered. His confession being the only new occurence in their set routine he could see no other catalyst for her leaving.

Anderson kept his job at MetaCortex feeling that when he quit it, he would have finally lost his hope of ever seeing her again. But when he returned home each evening to an empty apartment, where once he had been greeted warmly and with love, he couldn't help but ask the question that seemed likely to forever haunt him with the hopelessness of ever receiving an answer.

"Why did she leave me?"

* * *

"You had a girl of faith didn't you, Thomas?" the Oracle said but didn't wait for him to answer. "For all of your disbelief you went and fell in love with a girl so full of it her broken little mind would sometimes use all of that faith against her...tell her she was a _bad_ girl...that how could either God or you ever possibly want her?"

"Yes," Neo replied. "She was broken and I loved her."

"But you helped in healing her...just like any good man would...did she teach you in part how to be a good man Thomas "Neo" Anderson?"

"She taught me how to be broken too," Neo replied, a touch of coldness in his voice.

The Oracle tilted her head and looked at him askance as she dropped more ash into the tray. "But when you were together didn't you feel _complete_?"

Neo remembered all too strongly the feeling of her resting beside him and how with her he had felt whole for the first and only time inside of his life as Thomas Anderson.

"A whole man," the Oracle began. "He doesn't feel compelled to go looking for anything else, does he? He's content to stay where he is...to stay _what_ he is."

"What are you saying?" the man asked, feeling the hair on his body standing up.

"Would you have gone on looking for the answer behind the Matrix if you had settled down with Erin, Thomas?"

While the hair continued to be kept raised, the savior felt his blood not so much as stop but seem to run in reverse throughout the body which was only a mirage.

"No," he answered.

The Oracle almost abandoned her dwindling cigarette altogether but then only looked at him with abject pity. "Our worst enemies aren't the ones we hate; they are the ones that we love. Erin...she was to be the One's downfall...his anti-Christ because she would keep him unascended. Do you know what that would do to a girl of faith? Especially when she loved you almost as much as she loved her God?"

"How...how could the Matrix know that?" Neo hissed at the woman sitting across from him whom was telling him that the first woman he had ever loved had secretly been his enemy. "What does the Matrix know of love?"

"Not much," she replied. "But I do."

Just another nasty revelation in a day full of them and Neo found himself suddenly wishing that Trinity would just wake him up and stop any more from coming.

"The Matrix gave to me a simple request: keep you distracted from your mission. I simply chose the one girl that had everything you needed, poor boy," the Oracle said apologetically. "I found her where she was sleeping and I had her walk into that crummy cafe that day while you were both still dreaming...so that you would see one another and love each other just as I knew that you both would."

"DID _SHE_ KNOW?" Neo spat in deepest pain as he rose from the table.

"No," Oracle shook her head, her brown curls bouncing while they framed her peaceful face. "She was brought to me and I told her what she was and what you were too: Mankind's savior. I also told her that if she stayed with you every human being would be damned. And then they took her right back home."

Neo swallowed quickly, fighting a gag. It was as if Thomas wanted to emerge from him again, the human he had been, in a violent act of expulsion, a crude rebirth or sorts. He blinked away tears and tried to find his breath enough to say, "Morpheus?"

"And Switch...and Trinity."

Neo felt his heart break and shatter until it resembled the Matrix code and its shards of green rain.

"But don't hate them...Morpheus did what he thought was best and Trinity didn't want to love you. All the faithful commit sins in the name of their gods."

Neo...Thomas...whomever the Hell he was...didn't know what to say. All he could do was realize at last in his mind why his lover's worries had suddenly seemed to return after he had helped soothed them for months. He had become her enemy and her healer and the conflict had been killing her inside.

"The night she left me," Neo said. "She came to see you again didn't she?"

The Oracle looked impressed. "Now who's the seer?"

"It...it doesn't take much," Neo stated. "When you understand someone."

"Love is understanding," she said, nodding her head. The Oracle finally killed her cigarette and folded her arms on the table. Absently, Thomas Anderson thought of how his parents had always told him to keep his elbows off the dinner table. He supposed the woman had never had a parent to teach her the same manners. "Yes."

"What did she want to know?"

The Oracle's eyes were bright with remembrance. "She never doubted you were a great man, Neo and that you would save humanity. She just wanted to hear what your life together would have been like if she had stayed."

Neo fought back his tears. That would have been what Erin's doubt would have been reserved for. "Tell me what you told her," the man demanded, feeling in that moment that he needed it equally as much as Erin had but for different reasons.

"The time for it has passed," the Oracle said. "You took the red pill and are hooked up to a chair. Morpheus and Trinity will come looking for you and..."

"TELL ME!" Thomas Anderson shouted, his palms landing flat on the table as he leaned over it and glared at the woman.

He heard a priestess come to the door behind him but the Oracle merely motioned her away.

"You would have had a life few ever are blessed to experience. Your lives would have been long and joyful. There would have been a house with a white picket fence, children that adored you and were adored and cared for in return. A pet or two...You would have loved each other deeply, wholeheartedly and with great happiness. All of your dreams would have come true...the _both_ of you."

"They still _will_ ," Neo said, his blood running freely once more. He turned to leave declaring defiantly, "We'll send you an invititation to the wedding."

"That's fine," the woman said stopping him abruptly with both her unexpected response and warm smile. She stood and walked over to a kitchen drawer. Opening it she pulled out a Sharpie marker and crossed the distance of the kitchen floor in order to hand it to him. "Write it out with this."

In the kitchen doorway, the man eyed her with momentary suspicion before taking it and placing it inside of his pocket. "Okay," he muttered and then spun around, anxious to be rid of her infuriating stillness.

"Better find yourself an umbrella too!" the Oracle shouted after him. "Looks like rain!"

* * *

Before Tom had had difficulty in finding Erin but that was before he had become a god, Neo comforted himself. Now he could look into the code and try to find her, knowing that there was someone real to find; someone whom had abandoned him out of love and not of hate. However, seeing that the Oracle was right and that the rain he had sensed before had started to fall, the man stopped in at the apartment where once he had shared a few blissful months with the woman he had loved. It was a long shot but if the Matrix truly wanted him to fall from grace, and had listened to the Oracle's advice that only love could succeed in damning him, Neo decided that there remained a chance that what he wanted was still there. It was probably the same reason why an Agent had not found him yet or one of the Matrix's other helpers.

After Erin's departure, he had kept only two of her things and, in a fit of rage, given away everything else. Her umbrella with the world imprinted on it and the ring he had never actually given to her had stayed behind.

Breaking into the apartment with ease, knowing where he had hidden its other key, Neo quickly found the umbrella still lying in the closet. Reaching into its closed confines, he easily found the infinity ring, born within two matrixes, hidden inside. He stared at it, recalling how the last time he had done so it had been over the toilet bowl. Not having had the strength or heart to flush the ring, Thomas had dropped it into the umbrella instead and then gone to his computer to resume his search for the Matrix to help occupy his agonized mind.

Now, though, he would have the chance to give it to the person it had been made for. Grasping it in his hand, Neo headed out into the false world prepared to fall happily from Heaven just as the Oracle had predicated.

* * *

He should have known, Tom thought as he centered on the location inside of the Matrix where his lost forever love was. It was the same cafe which had witnessed their initial meeting. Of course, it only made sense that it would witness their reunion also. The rain fell from the sky in its hurried rush to encounter the ground and the man increased his step wanting to get to Erin as quickly as possible too. The Oracle was right. Even without her gift of foresight one could tell that there was no returning to that future they might have had once. Morpheus would soon come looking for him or maybe Trinity herself. He still loved his goddess and wished to spend his life with her, as well, but it could not be, not when Erin had sacrificed so much for him. If gods respected anything it was the act of a sacrifice; especially that of the self.

Nearing the cafe, however, Tom saw in shock that it was no longer in operation. The windows were boarded up and the window bore a sign declaring it available for lease. Thinking about the foul tasting liquid they passed off as coffee, Neo knew he should not have been all that surprised. Still, if it was closed, _where_ was what he had come to find? In confusion, turning the corner, Neo saw a woman sitting on a bench in front the building. She was sitting there, rubbing her left arm with her right hand and staring at the rain in front of her, counting the raindrops as if their number could be counted like the teardrops falling from her eyes.

Gray-green eyes that he knew so well.

Neo walked swiftly back behind the corner not wishing her to see him before he was ready. He could face a million Agents of the Matrix's design, stop a single bullet and survive a fall from a building top but finding the courage to walk towards one woman was as hard to achieve as keeping track of a single drop of rain amongst the million descending from the sky. While he was trying to become brave, Neo was given a better look at his lost love. She had lost weight since their last meeting. Not enough to make her completely thin but enough to indicate she had not been eating well. There were dark circles around her eyes professing eagerly that sleep had not come easily. The eyes contained within those frames of darkened flesh were bloodshot from the tears she was weeping and Neo felt a surge of overpowering love for her, more so than ever before.

She was struggling without him. This was apparent from her appearance and also from her desperate watch of the rain falling and how she let it willingly soak into the fabric of her clothing, obviously having no umbrella. That she had returned to this of all places, despite it having been closed for who knew how long, was a sign of her torment.

Both god and man loved the woman named Erin, he knew it then, and he felt his foot take the first step towards her having found all the strength it needed in his love and compassion for her.

Words then came to him, ones that had reached him once while he had been sleeping inside of a dream, unable to hear them but having heard them all the same.

" _You saved me. That's how I knew what they told me was right. You loved me for whom I was and accepted me. The demons went away whenever you were close. They'll be back when you're gone. I was lonely before you. I'll be lonely after you. But, at least, I had this time here in your arms...Thank you._ "

He could feel her kiss then on his lips also. This too while he was still sleeping.

As they all were inside of the lie of the Matrix.

Crystals embedded in the dirt.

Neo fell into the wall by him, watching the woman he still loved, and always would, as she held herself, continuing to study the heavy rain until she leaned back and closed her eyes, letting her tears mingle more with it.

Helplessly, in frustration, Neo now did the same.

_"It...it doesn't take much when you understand someone."_

And he understood Erin just as he always had.

She was struggling now but if he were to be with her it would completely _destroy_ her. He was a savior and she was his anti-Christ. She had been made to see their relationship as a sin and would never permit herself to be with him again without it killiing her. It wouldn't even need to happen all at once. But certainly over time the knowledge that she had kept him from his destiny as the "One" would wear away at her soul, nerves and sanity like the waves slowly ate away at the mass of rock at the bottom of a cliff. It would be the final piece of evidence needed to convince her that her demons had been right about her all along: that she was corrupt, evil and damned.

There could be no salvation for her after that.

Neo knew himself just as well.

Having taken Morpheus' offered red pill, he could never live a life with Erin inside of the Matrix without his brain eternally screaming at him that it was all a deception and that he and his lover had never even touched. The thought of offering her the red pill brought him no comfort. He had already suffered the deaths of too many good people in the real world: Tank, Dozer, Apoc, Mouse and Switch. But inside of this fake world he could be insured of her safety; for, at least, if the Matrix viewed her as a constant temptation to him they might keep Erin alive.

How could they ever possibly be together when both of their eyes had been opened?

His hand clutching the umbrella in fury, Neo wished to scream but wanted the woman to remain oblivious to his presence, incase, if by seeing him, it broke her completely where once he had been the one to mend her. The whole situation had become mad since their first initial meeting inside of the cafe; It was a cruel trick to play...to turn a believer into the devil and to transform a doubter into a god.

She was now the _opposite_ of him.

Gazing down at the umbrella and feeling the marker inside of his pocket beside the ring which had been waiting too long to fufill its own destined purpose, Neo found an answer to two questions at once.

* * *

A few seconds later, the marker back inside of his pocket but without company this time, Neo gazed around the corner at Erin, whom had apparently fallen asleep in her extreme exhaustion. It was just as well, Neo thought sadly, just like old times...He could not find the strength to do what he needed to without her being unaware of it. He needed the time to be able to walk away from her, a reversal of their roles in the past.

There was no point in being a god if you couldn't use the powers associated with it to help you in an act of divine intervention, miracles such slippery creatures as they were. Still, while he could stop bullets, Neo had never tried to stop the rain from falling and there was still enough of Thomas left inside to worry it couldn't be done. Holding up his hand, the god even found himself surprised when the rain was halted by his action. Tilting his gead backwards, the former and still in his way hacker, saw a million tiny raindrops like diamonds above his head. Moving his head back to its proper place, he saw them surrounding him as well like the pedestrians also frozen on the sidewalk. Neo walked through the suspended raindrops, letting them soak into his clothing along with their fallen brethren and walked to where Erin was sitting on her lonely bench, presumably with her memories only keeping her company.

Studying her face up closer now, he saw the deeper pain etched on it, like it was a battle map of the war she faced everyday and the scar she had been given by having left him. Oh the Oracle had chosen wisely, he thought painfully. How he had come to love his devil. It took everything in Neo's power not to take the sleeping woman in his arms and hold her. But then everything would be lost for certain: the god and his enemy destroying each other simply in their requited love.

Instead, gently, he placed the folded umbrella into her hand so when she awoke she would have it. Seeing the familiar blue, green and brown of the world on its canopy, and how it was momentaily a link between her body and his, Neo knew it was fitting. It was the image of the world they might have shared once; the world the Matrix had designed for them to have together and lose both their souls inside.

Quickly, Neo slipped the ring on Erin's finger, seeing them also now suddenly in the shape of two conjoined circles.

Looking up into the woman he loved's face one last time before he went off to find a phone so he could return to the Nebechezzar, Neo extended his finger and brought it to Erin's forehead, tracing the familiar symbol of the heart that she so often used as a talisman. "Hold on," he whispered. "You kept telling me you were waiting for a future paradise...wait just a little longer."

Rising to his feet, he kissed the soft skin on her forehead where the heart had been traced and started to walk away. On his way, he raised his hand and summoned the rain to continue its descent once more uninterrupted.

He was a few feet away from the park bench when he heard Erin's familiar voice say "Tom?"

Closing his eyes tightly, Neo tilted his head but could not bring himself to look at her. He was not some Orpheus foolish enough to turn back in the direction of Hades and lose forever what he had come back for in the first place. He intended to save the world, be its savior and have his devil too in the end. He would return to Morpheus and simultaneously play and fulfill his role as the "One." He would love Trinity and pray that she could find it in her heart at some point to understand how he could love both her and someone else at the same time. For when it was all over and the Matrix was defeated, when the world had no need for a savior of his kind or an anti-Christ of the type they had turned his poor lost lover into, Thomas "Neo" Anderson intended to find Erin where she lay sleeping and wake her from her dreaming.

Not looking back, Thomas "Neo" Anderson heard the sound of an umbrella opening behind him, one left to keep his lover dry so he could still protect her in one small way despite his absence. Eyes still closed, the man and god could perfectly see Erin raising her head and reading the words he had left her with:

_**You are my opposite of sin.**_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in a way, this is an ending but not a complete one. Knowing that there are 4 Matrix films, I thought it was only right to make 4 entries to this series. I'm planning out the next one, probably a one shot, but the final one won't probably come until after I've seen that fourth film which will hopefully be next year. Sigh.
> 
> I have to thank La_Gata_Nata for suggesting this story and her support. I couldn't have done it without you *hugs* And RelentlessBard, MoonFireStar and SayaBloom for their sweet words and support too! *hugs* *hugs* *hugs*
> 
> Honestly, you all rock and you have my love and gratitude forever! :D <3


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